An edge is not missing data. It is the instruction set for seeing. That came into focus after I watched a Google Gemini clip that tried to “walk into” Nighthawks and filled the frame with plausible alleys and doors. The location that inspired the painting sits at the corner of Greenwich Avenue and West 11th Street, on the block I have lived on for more than thirty years, so the difference between a boundary and a blank is not theoretical. In art, the frame tells you what not to cross. In a city, the curb and corner teach how a block holds together. In thinking, an edge slows the eye long enough for meaning to form. When feeds and models smooth those boundaries, we trade sequence for drift and memory for impressions. Keep the edge and you keep the scaffold of intelligence, the line between record, inference, and speculation. Keep the edge and you keep accountability, because claims can be tested and corrected. Creativity is not the removal of limits. It is the careful use of them. If we want culture that lasts and machines that help, we should protect the edges that let both make sense.

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